From: scottm@danielson.co.uk (Scott Matthewman)
To: "Andre-John Mas" <amas@lhr-sys.DHL.COM>, <www-html@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Page Inheritance
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 13:39:43 +0100
Message-ID: <19970702124359490.AAA259@scott.danielson.co.uk>
---------
> From: Andre-John Mas <amas@lhr-sys.DHL.COM>
>
> Frames were great, then the became annoying. You would click on one
> link and a page would appear in one frame and if it has frames then
> sub frames will, appear each time the frames get smaller. What I would
> like to see is an alternative approach to frames and that is page
> inheritance. Basically, you say here's my page and here, here and here
> it will inherit features of pages X,Y and Z. Visually, it would be one
> page, because the system would interpret the final result as if it was
> one page, not three individual pages. This idea is that if you click
> on a link a new page would replace the existing one, instead of
> appearing in a sub-frame.
Er... this is already possible through appropriate use of the <A> tag's
TARGET attribute. (If you want to replace the current frameset, set the
TARGET to "_parent" or "_top", depending on which is more appropriate.
> This approach would mean that I could modify my site menu without
> having to include an individual one on each page or get annoyed at
> the subtlties of frames.
>
> The tag might appear as follows:
>
> <INHERIT HREF="http://..../">
>
> Using that a page that has inherited my side menu might inherit
> it by the following tag:
>
> <INHERIT HREF="/inherit/menu.html?home">
This is essentially what might be termed "client-side includes", I suppose.
It might be useful, I suppose, although SSI, ASPs and various other
author-specific methods already do the same sort of thing. The big
disadvantage to doing it on the client side would be backwards
compatibility, I guess
----
Scott A. Matthewman, Danielson Limited <scottm@danielson.co.uk>
Tel: +44 (0)1296 24478. Fax: +44 (0)1296 392141